Throughout the course of Salvador Dalí’s life and career it was increasingly hard to distinguish the artist from the showman-cum-self publicist and exhibitionist. Dalí was many things – artist, sculptor, photographer, clothing & object designer, film-maker, writer and poet … and in his later years a facilitator of fake copies of his own work!

Early on in his artistic apprenticeship Dalí began by taking the conventional path, studying the old masters (especially Raphael, Velázquez and Vermeer) which honed his ultra realistic technique. Dabbling initially in Fauvism (inspired by Matisse), he gravitated towards the iconoclastic Surrealists. The Surrealist movement’s insistence on the primacy of the unconscious as a precondition to creativity neatly fused with his own views which had been shaped by his readings of Freud. Typically though Dalí forged his own self-referential brand of Surrealism which he termed the paranoiac-critical method.

Dalí visited America (New York) for the first time in 1934 where he was enthusiastically embraced as “the embodiment of Surrealism”[1]. After the Nazis invaded France in 1940 Dalí fled back to New York, where he sat out the war.
A mania for shock and outrage
The dandyish Dalí found America the ideal milieu in indulge in his predilection for shocking and scandalising the public. Numbered among the periodical, zany antics and pranks pulled by Dalí and his “collaborator-in-crime”, his much vilified Russian émigré wife Gala, were:

▹ attending a masquerade party with Gala dressed as the Lindbergh baby and he as the kidnapper (a grievous miscalculation by the Dalís as the heinous celebrity crime was still fresh in American minds, requiring the artist to afterwards beg forgiveness for the appalling taste of his stunt)
▹ attending a “Dalí Ball” in his honour wearing a glass case displaying a bra
▹ organising an event in a Manhattan bookshop in 1962 where he signed copies of his book in a hospital bed whilst he was wired up to a brain wave machine[2].

SD & BabouDalí delighted in over-the-top, exhibitionist displays of eccentricity. As he got older his shtick included prancing round with exotic wild animals on a leash (exotic animals have long been the accessory du jour for celebrities). He was well known for taking his pet South American ocelot with him on luxury cruises and to swanky restaurants. Photos also show him walking a giant anteater around the streets of New York on a lead as if it was the family dog.

Dalí’s ‘oddball’ gimmicks were all part of the artist’s “carefully cultivated image of a madman”[3]. The prevalence of photos of Dalí with chickens or other objects on his head, etc. points to the contrived nature of his eccentricity. Dalí’s appearances before the camera, unkempt hair, imperious piercing eyes and trademark extravagantly curled moustache, added to the image of an unhinged persona.

‘Temptation of St Anthony’ (see below)Dalí’s enfant terrible behaviour (a condition that persisted his whole life!), whilst good for keeping him in the public eye and boosting sales, nonetheless alienated many in the art world. The Surrealists eventually disowned the Catalan artist for his egomaniacal antics and his blatant and shameless exhibitionism and commercialism. In 1939, Andre Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, gave Dalí the nickname Avida Dollars (an anagram of “Salvador Dalí”) which can be translated as “eager for dollars”[4].

Some observers have noted that the Surrealists’ reasons for rejecting Dalí had also to do with his increasingly apolitical position in the wake of the rising tide of fascism in the 1930s (going so far as to suggest that Dalí was soft on Nazism). Breton and other left-wing members of the movement, by contrast to Dalí, had used their Surrealist writing and art to attack the direction taken by Hitler and Mussolini. Later when Dalí happily returned to live in post-war Spain under the uncompromising dictatorship of Franco, he was further howled down by the Leftist artists sympathetic to communism[5].

Spending long periods in America (and specifically Hollywood) from the late 1930s allowed Dalí to continue his interest and involvement in film. Even before first coming to America he was very much into cinema. In 2007 the Figueres-based Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, in conjunction with the Tate Modern, held an exhibition called ‘Dali and Film’ in London which details his long association with film[6]. In the late 1920s-early 1930s he had made two polemically radical films with Luis Bunuel, a later master director of the screen (Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or).

After coming in contact with Hollywood, Dalí, through his friendship with Harpo Marx, worked on writing of a screenplay for a Marx brothers movie to be called ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ (planned scenes included gas mask-wearing giraffes and Chico in a deep-sea diving suit playing the piano bore the unmistakable Dalí touch). Plans for the movie were unfortunately scuttled after Groucho put the kibosh on it[7].

Dalí’s set from ‘Spellbound’During the years he lived in America, Dalí worked with Hollywood luminaries of the calibre of Hitchcock and Disney. The Spanish artist, surprisingly for many in the US, became very good friends with Walt Disney. Walt and Sal collaborated on a short cartoon (Destino) but the project was not completed by them (possibly because Dalí’s ideas were “too explicit” for Disney). With Hitch, on Spellbound (a psychological crime thriller), Dalí created the artistic set for the dream sequence scene. He also later worked with director Vincente Minnelli on Father of the Bride creating some characteristic Dalí motifs[8].

At the Tate Modern exhibition back in 2007 one of the Dalí paintings that caught my attention for being somewhat incongruous was a rather conservative (for Dalí!) portrait of Hollywood movie mogul Jack L Warner*. I wasn’t aware at the time but apparently the powerful Warner Brothers studio head was also a friend of Dalí. A strange association I thought but his estranged, one-time friend Luis Bunuel in his autobiography opined that Dalí was always attracted to the company of multi-millionaires (so much so he became one! … Dalí left an estate worth around US$32m). Cecil B De Mille was another Hollywood establishment heavyweight that Dalí cultivated a friendship with.

A further surprise for me at the Tate ‘Dalí and Film’ exhibition was to see how small many of the Catalan’s artworks were. For example, Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (AKA ‘Melting Clocks’), one of his most famous and most referenced paintings, stands at a mere 10″ x 13″, virtually a miniature!

Dalí was praised for his avant-garde work in the thirties and universally admired for his artistic technical virtuosity. But by the fifties and sixties most of that distinctive originality had dried up. Influential art critic Robert Hughes summarised Dali’s later oeuvre as “kitschy repetition of old motifs or vulgarly pompous piety on a Cinemascope scale”[9]. By this time Dalí’s unchecked commercialism had overshadowed all vestiges of his artistic integrity (he had stooped to doing TV ads for Lanvin Chocolates, designing logos for Chupa Chups, etc)

Controversy continued to dog Dalí into his seventies and eighties. As he got older and frailer he became embroiled in forgery scandals. He resorted to signing thousands of blank canvases (possibly he was coerced into this by the manipulative Gala and other ‘hangers-ons’ close to him in their haste to cash in on the famed Dalí name). To this day fakes and frauds of Dalí’s paintings and lithographs (some with real signatures) proliferate around the world with countless numbers of unsuspecting buyers finding themselves lumbered with inauthentic Dalís.

PostScript: The Dalí style
Dalí’s art is characteristically laden with ideography, much of it religious (eg, several on Gala as Madonna, one coupling her with Dalí as a monk, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus); often his landscapes are populated by bizarre animal symbols (eg, burning giraffes; elephants and horses with extremely long but thin (stilt-like) legs (The Temptation of St Anthony). Some works border on the pornographic (eg, a dismembered nude girl being sodomised by rhinoceros horns!?!) and there is a onanistic element to some of his paintings (eg, The Great Masturbator). Violent human dismemberment is another recurrent theme (eg, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans). He also enjoyed experimenting with optical effects in his works, like superimposing faces onto landscapes (eg, Paranoiac Visage.)

Our coach took the M3 expressway from Budapest to Bratislava. Most of the roadway between the two Central European capitals was a vista of seemingly endless fields of Van Gogh-like sunflowers. When we got to the Slovakian border we were able to seamlessly cross over thanks to both countries being EU signees of the Schengen Agreement … no vehicle stops, no passport checks, etc. Fast-forward just six months, there would no such easy passage for Syrian asylum seekers trying to make it to refugee-friendly Germany.

Bratislava centre mapWe parked up the hill near the tramlines and walked down the ancient looking steps to the Town. Old Bratislava was composed of a “rabbit warren” of roughly cobbled lanes and narrow streets leading directly or less directly to the town square. The first thing that caught my eye (near the under-road tunnel) was a smoking salon, decked out with comfy chairs much like a cafe (actually it might be characterised as a “smoking cafe with coffee optional”). I was bit surprised to find this establishment here, only because I’d heard from a Slovak acquaintance in Australia that smoking parlour shops had been outlawed in Slovakian cities, but here it was, couples happily chugging away at the weed in relaxing surroundings. Mind you, they were lots of other public places anyway that you could freely smoke anywhere in the town (so a shop specialising in smoking seemed a bit superfluous to this outsider!).

It was very hot on the day we visited (about 35-36 degrees), so most of the locals were content to sit round drinking their pivo of choice in the numerous bars (vyčapy) all over the old town. One of the cobblestone street in particular was a kind of “booze bingers’ alley”, wall-to-wall liquor swilling outlets strung out along a dark, dingy bar strip.

One especially popular bar (called, what else? … “the Dubliner”) had the right idea in the heat, it had affixed a sprinkler system of sorts to the underside of the shop awning allowing the sweltering patrons the relief of jets of soft droplets of water whilst they were imbibing. Budapest had a similar thing … a number of Váci utca restaurants were equipped with fans blowing gentle mists of cold vapour (perfumed?) on to diners.

Cultural pointer: Beer drinking du jour is the norm in Bratislava – and cheaper than H2o I found out! … when finally we were driven inside one of the bars by the unrelenting heat, the spring water I ordered cost me €1.80 whereas the half-litre of beer my companions both had cost them a mere €1.20 each!?!

From Bratislava’s central square, tourists can explore the town on a dinky toy train (in keeping with the ‘Lilliputian’ scale of the Slovakian capital). Many of Bratislava’s public buildings seemed a little tired, in need of a facelift or a paint job – or both.

Among the locals, especially the younger women, I noticed a high percentage of blonds (very much in line with what I observed in the Czech Republic). Amusingly one stopped me in the street to ask me, in animated Slovakian, for directions! I am getting used to being mistook for a local but it still bemuses me why.

Bratislavsky Hrad from Staré MêstoOn the north side of the Danube (about 15 minutes walk from the Old Town) is what is probably the city’s most impressive historic structure, the formidable Bratislava Castle (Bratislavsky hrad). The original castle dates from the early 10th century and has passed through the hands of Moravian, Hungarian, Czech and Slovakian rulers. Its historical strategic importance lies in its elevated location on the fringe of the vast Carpathian Mountains.

Footnote: Tiny Slovakia cf. Even Tinier Slovenia
We visitors to Europe from the other side of the world get these two small Central/Southern European republics mixed up so often (no excuses though once you have actually visited each one!). I can only imagine how frustrating this must be to the Slovaks and Slovenes themselves … especially as both peoples long existed as subordinate ethnic identities in their respective, larger former states before finally freeing themselves from the shadow of numerically larger ethnic groups.

“Czechy Crumbly”, well not exactly, but that’s what I thought the name of this place sounded like when I first heard it was on the itinerary of our trip to the Czech Republic. This small town 170km south of the Czech capital isn’t exactly crumbling but it is very old … and exceedingly picturesque. The combination of its beauty, charm and size has led many visitors to describe it as a miniature version of Prague.

Zámek Krummau: CK Just the ticket!The 13th century Gothic castle (Zámek), on the left bank of the Vltava River, is the magnet for most visitors to Český Krumlov (or Krumlaw). The castle is a long complex of buildings (40+), courtyards (5!) & 10ha of Baroque gardens, its entirety stretches from a lower point near an old part of the city (Latran) through the Red Gate up to the upper castle. As you would imagine with a grand structure so historically significant, the castle has the customary UNESCO accreditation.

Most visitors pay to clamber up the 162 steps of the Castle Tower staircase to glimpse the commanding, 360 degree-views of CK. Gazing east across the river you can see the orangey-yellow terracotta roofs of the Inner Town (Centrum). The Inner Town sits on a curved nub of land which follows the contours of the winding river and offers a smorgasbord of quaint medieval buildings.

Below the walkway and the Castle Tower (Zámez Čnít), between the first and second courtyards, there is a bear moat with a few remaining brown bears prowling solemnly around its confines. Bears have been kept here since the days in which the city was ruled by the House of Rožmberk (Rosenberg)(Rožmberk Castle itself is some 25km south of CK).

Cloak BridgeOne of the most distinctive architectural features which connects the Upper Castle with the Castle Theatre is the Cloak Bridge which has apartments and a viewing platform resting on huge, stone arched foundations resembling viaducts.

Centrum has lots of cobblestoned back lanes full of cafés and bars, but something also worth visiting is the museum dedicated to the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele whose edgy, controversial figurative works earned him the ire of the socially conservative burghers of Český Krumlov during the two years he lived in the city (just before WWI).

CK is a pleasant, picture postcard sort of place, stocked to the rafters with tourist trade wares. The Vltava which looked more like a stream than a river where we were, apparently has rafting listed among its visitor activities. Judging by how still and tranquil the water was, unless its about “slo-mo” rafting, the serious stuff must be a long way downstream from the city weir.